70 percent of enterprises expect to have an all-flash storage infrastructure to support business critical applications by 2020 according to a Frost and Sullivan survey
EMC Corporation today announced the findings of EMC-sponsored research from Frost and Frost & Sullivan 
revealing that all-flash storage is rapidly becoming the storage technology of choice for CIOs in India. One in two CIOs surveyed in the ‘Flash Adoption Study’ plan to move to an all-flash data center by 2020. This highlights the readiness of enterprises today to accept flash into their IT infrastructure in order to boost agility and mobility against the backdrop of an increasingly complex business landscape.
The study shows aggressive evaluation of flash over the last two years and reveals a commitment to making a positive shift toward flash. In fact, 70 percent of enterprises in India expect to have an all-flash storage infrastructure to support most business critical applications by 2020.
The primary goal of all-flash deployment by technology heads and CIOs in India surveyed is operational efficiency; 39 percent of the respondents highlighted it as the number one factor that determines their technology investment and usage. Speed and agility are critical for the enterprise today as they have strong implications for revenue growth and profitability. A milli-second delay in application response can lead to delay in sales, loss in brand equity, and even churn to competitors. The requirements of new business models and customer experience are highly fluid; hence, CIOs have to be armed with solutions that are easy to manage, and promise 24/7 responsiveness.
70 percent of organizations surveyed stated that flash delivers performance and agility, with the majority of these enterprises currently using flash technology to support their mission critical databases including Oracle- or SAP-based business applications (43 percent); Virtualized servers (35 percent), and business intelligence and analytics (24 percent). As technologies such as IoT become more pervasive compounding the explosion of data, flash storage is expected to be more-widely adopted for business intelligence and analytics.
EMC offers the industry’s broadest all-flash portfolio, purpose-built to address virtually any enterprise data center use case:
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XtremIO® all-flash arrays for accelerating and consolidating mixed block storage workloads such as databases, analytics, server virtual machines, and virtual desktop infrastructures that require consistent and predictable performance with sub-millisecond latencies. XtremIO is designed to address most high-end enterprise workloads with some of the industry’s best inline data compression and de-duplication capabilities for improved economics.
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VMAX® All Flash for consolidating mixed block and file workloads that require the highest levels of enterprise availability, rich data services, IBM mainframe and iSeries support, and scalable storage growth. VMAX All Flash offers the gold standard of replication, recovery, data services and quality of service, re-engineered with all flash to deliver up to four petabytes of storage capacity.
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DSSD™ D5™ Rack-Scale Flash – a new flash storage category with breakthrough performance – for the most performance-intensive, traditional and next-generation use cases that require microsecond latencies such as real-time analytics for Hadoop and Oracle.
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Unity™ – a new family of simple, affordable storage systems that deliver enterprise capabilities, all-flash performance and cloud-like simplicity for under $18,000. Unity supports file and block storage for small- and medium-sized IT departments and is available in all-flash array, hybrid array, software-defined and converged configurations.
EMC Executive Quote
Srihari Palangala, Director and Head of Marketing at EMC
“In today’s business environment, executives face an unprecedented level of complexity. On top of this, the pressure to produce faster and innovate quicker is increasing. Access to real-time analytics with quicker decision support and real-time development is key, making AFA one of the fastest growing segments. In fact, customers of our AFA Solution, XtremIO, are dramatically reducing development time and driving down costs, achieving the agility they need to remain competitive.”
Analyst Quote
Benoy CS, Research Director, Digital Transformation, Frost & Sullivan
“Flash storage is fast becoming the choice for CIOs in India. New age organizations are constantly upgrading their systems to suit the SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) paradigm. With data being the center for improving efficiency, developing new business models and enhancing customer experience, a flexible storage infrastructure with high quality of service (QoS), that can ensure business continuity, compliance, and data protection, is the need of the hour. Flash resonates with performance, resilience, and agility – highly crucial factors for the success of any digital enterprise today.”
End-user/ Flash storage user Quote
JS Sodhi, CIO, Amity University
“Flash (represents) performance…and this is critical for us. We have a beautiful state-of-the-art education ERP starting from filling that form, admission, test, interview then selection then fees, attendance, examination, assignment submission, everything is digitalized and it is an online workflow. Flash with its capabilities in performance, agility and 24/7 availability can be used for all our mission-critical databases.”
Bikash Lohia, Director, Merino Services
“Balancing the performance with read-write endurance is the key. If you do not have performance then everything else falls into the back seat. Even budgeting concerns is not of much concern but performance is crucial. Performance defines everything 50% of our infrastructure is on flash we are planning to move to all-flash soon when pricing goes down. Flash offers scalability, flexibility and performance.”
D N Vijayendra Kumar, GM-IT, HPCL
“Initially we had to deal with a lot of crashed laptops and desktops and developers were losing their precious codes. After moving to VDI, these issues were addressed, however as the user count increased we noticed boot delays. We decided to move to VDI on flash storage. Flash removed boot slowness completely and developers are happy now. Performance boost is the main advantage. Inbuilt redundancy and dedup take care of heavy duty writing on flash storage. Flash is the future. The good news is that prices are coming down and we’re open to adopting more in the future.”
Methodology
The research was conducted by Frost & Sullivan on behalf of EMC. Frost & Sullivan spoke with 46 CIOs and technology heads from mid-size to large enterprises in nine industries to determine the top business goals that drive decisions around digital transformation and technology, the adoption of flash storage, its perceived benefits, and their roadmap for flash-based application until 2020. The research analysis is based on findings from an objective questionnaire as well as in-depth interviews on the adoption levels of flash and the trends regarding the same in India.
